Dylan's Visions of Sin (62 page)

Hopes shatter. They both break things (hearts, for instance) and are broken. “And the silent night will shatter”: the line gets trenchancy from the two-edged “shatter”,
but it gains its unobtrusive force, which is to be dramatic without being melodramatic, from Dylan’s decision simply to have it be the sole unrhyming line.

I want to pass over for a while the second verse (which puzzles me, or has me puzzled as to my own responses), and to feel through the third, the final verse, where there are further turns of
the thumbscrew, rhyme-wise.

The closing rhyme of this final verse, as of the second verse (
sign / behind
), is assonance more than rhyme,
mine / behind
, but this is tightened by the urgencies and exigencies
of the assonantal accessaries before the fact:

Oh, this concedes a good deal (unlike the good old condescension of “We are all doing God’s work, you in your way, and we in His”), but the fivefold assonance
(
right / side / I’m / right / mine
) has its obduracy, with just two chimes in the line that is yours, but with one more (one too many?), three, in the line that just happens to be mine. At
least there is an effort at fair play, at landscaping the playing-field (you know, the level one) that is so often invoked these days.
⁴⁵³
At least
the effect is not what it would have been, far more one-sidedly, if the lines had gone like this:

– where instead of being assonantally three of mine to two of yours, it would have been four to one.

At the start of this last verse it had been its first entire rhyme that created the dead sound, the dead accurate sound, that tolled finality:

No good / as good
: it feels and is as good as nothing. A rhyme to nullify a state of affairs or a marriage, it is blankness itself.

In
The Lotos-Eaters
, Tennyson’s first rhyme was likewise no rhyme at all, offering not the combination of likeness with unlikeness that is a rhyme but an “always” that is
eternally the same:

Or, One Too Many Afternoons. In the afternoon . . . it seemèd always afternoon: this, from start to finish, or rather, with no way of telling
start from finish. Tennyson himself commented on the effect when a “land” comes unto a “land”: “‘The strand’ was, I think, my first reading, but the no
rhyme of ‘land’ and ‘land’ was lazier.”
⁴⁵⁴
Lazier as being in static sympathy with those who are soon to enjoy the
fixity of the drug that is the lotos; for the poet, less lazy than the first-draft rhyme,
strand / land
. It is an apt effect, stagnant the while.

Stagnation is the consequence when the best that “no good” can do turns out to be “as good”:

This is paralysis. You might think that nothing could be a more perfect rhyme, a more full rhyme, than rhyming a word with itself – but then nothing could be less of a
rhyme, either, since there is no plurality, simply a single impasse, no chance to advance. We have the term
rime riche
when rhyme-words sound the same but have a different sense: say, glasses
against glasses, with the one being spectacles and the other to drink from. Or the word “well” in
Subterranean Homesick Blues
, where Dylan rhymes “get well” with or against
“ink well”. An odd kind of rhyme, this, yet with its own nature. But the rhyme-word coming up against the same word in obdurately the same sense? This is not a rich rhyme, but a
stricken one in its poverty of spirit, a rhyme that is no good except as conveying that all this is no good. One too many mornings but one too few rhyme-words.

A rhyme can be seen under the aspect of a kiss. Keats has in
Isabella
an exquisite pair of lines, incorporating a rhyme upon “rhyme” that takes up the preceding word
“time”:

But “good” against “good”? Or, worse, “no good” against “as good”? This is like kissing yourself in the
mirror, full on the lips, the only place you can kiss yourself in the mirror, and yet somehow not as satisfying as one had hoped, don’t you find?

It’s a restless hungry feeling, all right, or not at all all right. But one of the things that saves these lines of Dylan from the comforts of despair is their burly refusal to get
grammar, to turn King’s English evidence, to run any risk of sounding like a prissy sissy. Try this:

– not good. For the song is positively right to feel so negatively about what has come to pass. “That don’t mean no one no good”: this isn’t a
double negative, it’s a triple whammy. It is true that there are days when “negativity don’t pull you through”(
Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues
). But there are mornings
when it just might.

Or try this:

– less well said than “You can say it just as good”, no? In the particular circumstances, be it said. “A particular type of people walking on a
particular type of street”.

It is true that those of us who founded the Society for the Protection of Parts of Speech feel very strongly about this particular endangered species, the adverb. But just as Nope does not mean
the same as No, so “You can say it just as good” does not mean the same as “You can say it just as well”. I still remember the thrill that ran through me in the fifties (I
was in my twenties) when I heard that an American poet at Oxford, Donald Hall, fully five years my senior, had said of poetry that “You gotta fake it but you gotta fake it good”. True,
the well-educated young Don was kinda faking it, but he knew who he was talking to (to whom he was talking?): even-younger Englishmen and Englishwomen who would all but swoon at the uncowed
manliness that knew better than to say “fake it well” when it was so much
more democratic, so much less truckling, to say “fake it good”. Agreed,
there is truckling and truckling. For an artist to unload his head, he needs
not
to truckle. Which is why “You can say it just as good” succeeds in splicing two things to say: You can
say it just as well / You can say something just as good.

This is the moment in the song, late in the song, when there arrives a real
you
at last, someone addressed, not respectably dressed as in the “my love and I” of the
middle verse.
Just as good
: the word “just”, with its low-key cold charity, comes twice in this last verse, and just in this verse.

We’re both just hopeless. We’re both a great way behind, and so neither of us has fallen behind the other – which is how it had sounded when it was just a
matter of saying

The first verse of
One Too Many Mornings
had left unrhymed a single line. The hopes in the mind of the last verse are even more shattered. There is an appeal to Hope that is
launched by rhyme and assonance, but it falls on deaf ears:
no good / as good
,
side / mine / behind
,
feeling / a-sayin’ / mornings
. That all eight lines, not just the founding four, are held
together: this might have been heartening. But not here. Held together: here it feels like a vice, thanks (no thanks) to the metal plates aligned as
no good / as good
.

Which leaves the verse that I left behind, the middle verse.

I have vacillated about this verse, and still do. In the days when I was brief and stern, the principle invoked was the one so imaginatively marked by Gerard M. Hopkins:

Great men, poets I mean, have each their own dialect as it were of Parnassian, formed generally as they go on writing, and at last, – this is the point to be marked,
– they can see things in this Parnassian way and describe them in this Parnassian tongue, without further effort of inspiration. In a poet’s particular kind of Parnassian lies most of
his style, of his manner, of his mannerism if you like . . . Now it is a mark of Parnassian that one could conceive oneself writing it if one were the poet. Do not say that if you were Shakespeare
you can conceive yourself writing Hamlet, because that is just what I think you
cannot
conceive.
⁴⁵⁵

Hopkins’s principle is itself an inspiration,
⁴⁵⁶
and I hold to it. But I have become more than uneasy about holding it to
this particular moment in
One Too Many Mornings
. Not that it would be possible for Dylan to have escaped Parnassian – one of the best things about the way in which Hopkins puts his point is
his understanding of the naturalness, the inevitability, the commonalty of it all (“Great men, poets I mean”, all of them), along with the sincere admiration that the poetry of Tennyson
excited in him.
Enoch Arden
, published the previous month in 1864, was what prompted Hopkins in this letter of his.

I think one had got into the way of thinking, or had not got out of the way of thinking, that Tennyson was always new,
touching
beyond other poets,
not pressed with human ailments, never using Parnassian. So at least I used to think. Now one sees he uses Parnassian; he is, one must see it, what we used to call Tennysonian. But the discovery of
this must not make too much difference. When puzzled by one’s doubts it is well to turn to a passage like this. Surely your maturest judgment will never be fooled out of saying that this is
divine, terribly beautiful – the stanza of
In Memoriam
beginning with the quatrain

I think one had got into the way of thinking, or had not got out of the way of thinking, that Dylan was always new, touching beyond other poets. Now one sees he uses Parnassian.
But the discovery of this must not make too much difference. When puzzled by one’s doubts it is well to turn to a passage like this. Surely your maturest judgement will never be fooled out of
saying that this is beautiful:

But as to my judgement that the second verse of
One Too Many Mornings
is Parnassian: I am no longer sure that I was right, even from my side.

This, unlike the first and last verses which are inspired, is Parnassian, and – like most Parnassian – it is, in its complaisance, vulnerable to humour, such a worse
than unwanted suggestion as “From the crossroads of my doorstep / My eyes they start to cross”. I can conceive myself writing “the crossroads of my doorstep” if I were Dylan
– and I do not say to myself that if I were Dylan I can imagine myself writing the inspired no-rhyme of “good” and “good” in the song’s last stanza . . . This,
in its pained numbness, is something quite other than “From the crossroads
of my doorstep”, which I can conceive myself writing if I were the artist who wrote,
elsewhere, “through the smoke rings of my mind”. Do not say that
if
you were Shakespeare you can imagine yourself writing
Hamlet
; come to that, do not say that
if
you were Dylan you can
imagine yourself writing “Ophelia, she’s ’neath the window, / For her I feel so afraid”.
⁴⁵⁷

It used to go like that. Now it goes like this, or might go on like this.

Just a minute, you’re using the phrase “through the smoke rings of my mind” as a smokescreen. It is really nothing like “From the crossroads of my doorstep”. The
line from
Mr. Tambourine Man
(or rather, half-line) floats free, and knows it: “Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind”. It is up and away. The line –
full line, this one – from
One Too Many Mornings
is quite a different story, and it tells a different story. For one thing, it is two things.